A Skateboard Wheel Spinning Really Fast Changes Shape Radically

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The Grand Canyon is one of the greatest natural wonders our world has to offer, and a big reason it exists is because of the destructive power of water. Sure, that level of erosion happened over the course of thousands and millions of years, but if you can concentrate the force of moving water, you can make some more significant destruction happen a lot more quickly. That’s what the folks on the YouTube channel Waterjet Channel explore, and they found that a 60,000 PSI jet of water is capable of doing things you probably wouldn’t expect.

In a recent video, they see what it looks like when you cut a skateboard and skateboard sneakers in half, but easily the most interesting part of their experiments is when they see how fast they can make a skateboard wheel spin. They turn on the jet, which immediately and cleanly creates a hole through the board, and when the water hits the wheel, in a twist nobody saw coming, it starts to spin so fast that it expands and explodes.

They don’t explain what happens (mainly because they seem pretty amazed and dumbfounded by what happened), but what it looks like is that the rotational velocity of the spinning wheel got so fast, that the centrifugal force becomes too much for the rubber to be able to maintain its shape. Then, it seems that the combination of the rotational velocity and the water jet’s increasing ability to cut through the expanding rubber causes the wheel to break and fly off.

It’s really a bizarre thing to watch, so check it out above and let us know in the comments what other water jet experiments you’d like to see.